Better to be happy today than wait for a better tomorrow

8 December 2008

I spoke to a man this week, who owes his life to a broomstick. Now he’s entertaining people by performing Elvis impersonations — and he’s very good at them. Had it not been for the broomstick, and the handle of a mop which he used to wedge closed the door behind which he was hiding, Gordon would be dead, shot by the gunmen who walked into his shop to steal from him.

In common with most people who have been threatened by dull-eyed criminals intent on killing them, facing death has given Gordon new sense of life.

I feel the same after I was attacked in my home then a few months later hijacked by three men with pistols. Now, it seems to me that what we, the victims of crime share, is not only the mind-numbing trauma of the incident itself but also a new will to live. And we all appear to have developed a kind of freeze frame perspective of things.

I notice that more often colours are brighter, my vision is more clear, I have increased levels of energy but most of all I seem to have a fresh sense of wonder about the world and my place in it. This is not to say that I don’t bump into everyday life and get bounced, shaken and given whacks on the side of the head from time-to-time. I do.

But the difference is that I bounce back more quickly, brush the irrelevance of petty issues aside more easily, hold on to negative things people say to me with less vigour and look instead to finding stuff to enrich my life and make me happy.

It’s as if I have stopped being a bystander in my own life and begun to live it. And that’s what Gordon re-affirmed. “If something is worth doing I do it now,” he says. “There may not be a tomorrow.” To quote Lennon, the dead Beatle not Lenin, the dead communist, life is what happens to you “while you are busy making other plans.” But we all know that. Why then, I wonder, are we all so busy making plans to be happy tomorrow or some other time in the future.

Lately I notice that almost everyone is busy. “Hi” I say to people what about …? “I’m busy” they retort cutting me short, then spend the next ten minutes giving me intimate details of busy they are. Busy will still be there tomorrow I think no matter how busy we are today. And sadly more often than not busy today, won’t make busy tomorrow go away. So why not just put busy down for a minute or two and go for a walk on the beach, watch the sunset, or take the time to step away from busy to go outside and look at the crescent moon, for instance, sharing space in the sky in perfect formation with Jupiter and Venus.

That happened this week. It won’t happen again for over 1 000 years. And I saw it, and it was beautiful. So, I am extremely pleased that I was not left bleeding to death in a doorway in Rondebosch, Gordon is delighted that he did not get a bullet in his head in his shop that morning.

They take our power away these people who prey on us with their violence. But the good news is that we get it back and we are more powerful because we are alive and we can see and we can feel and we can hear and we can touch and we can put busy down, every now and again, to dance to the music of who we really — and celebrate that are alive and living.

This column appeared in the Cape Times on 8 December 2008.